This is an archive copy of a document originally located at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/sportsf/stories/s590482.htm
With Amanda Smith
28/6/2002
Blowing the Whistle on World Cup Referees
Summary:
As the World Cup for soccer draws to its conclusion, a look back on the
standard of refereeing at this tournament. It’s been the hot topic of the
World Cup, with accusations and conspiracy theories flying thick and fast as
powerful teams have fallen to lesser soccer countries. So has the refereeing
been unjustifiably bad?
Plus, for the 70th anniversary of the ABC, the early days of cricket on the
wireless. The “synthetic cricket” broadcasts of the 1930s were an
extraordinary combination of fact and fiction on the part of the ABC, and an
extraordinary piece of broadcasting history.
Details or Transcript:
Amanda Smith: And as we get to that World Cup Final, on The Sports Factor
we’re scrutinising the standard of refereeing at the tournament. Has it been
as egregious as the disappointed have made out?
THEME
Amanda Smith: Also coming up, because this weekend is also the 70th anniversary
of the foundation of the ABC, we’re going back to the early days of cricket on
the wireless, and the ‘synthetic’ cricket broadcasts of the 1930s, a
marvellous exercise in faking it, and a great story in the history of
broadcasting.
Commentator: Farnes turns, runs in bowling to Bradman, the ball’s
well-pitched, Bradman moves forward, drives, Compton at cover tries to cut him
off, is beaten by the pace of the ball and it races away for another four.
APPLAUSE
Man: I had to settle some bets. I had several letters from people who said they
bet that it came directly from England, and somebody had tried to persuade them
it didn’t. So there’s no doubt about it, a lot of people were convinced that
it was directly from the ground and not from the studio.
Amanda Smith: And more on the bizarre way that cricket was done on Australian
radio back in the 1930s later in the program.
Before that though, The World Cup. After all the ups and downs of hot favourites
losing and minnows winning, Sunday’s final has shaken down to a contest
between two seasoned World Cup campaigners in Brazil and Germany. But did some
teams win and some teams lose along the way because of bad refereeing? For sure
he referees and linesmen at this World Cup have come in for much more criticism
than usual. So is it justified? Roy Hay is a soccer historian and writer.
Roy Hay: I don’t think so, and I think if we were to subject even the worst
official at the World Cup, (I put ‘worst’ in inverted commas) if we
subjected the ‘worst’ official at the World Cup to the proper scrutiny which
would be to run all these decisions and assess how many he got wrong, you’d
probably find that they were batting at something about 95% or better, and I
don’t think many players would go through a match with such a record. So on
the whole, I don’t think refereeing decisions at this World Cup have been
significantly worse than in the past. I think we are now provided with so much
more information about those decisions, both from the commentators and from the
video, that we’re able to second-guess officials far more than we’ve ever
been able to do, and that gives the impression that standards are going down,
whereas I think standards are probably increasing.
Amanda Smith: Well let’s look at the different kinds of contentious refereeing
decisions that have been at this World Cup. The offside decisions first.
Roy Hay: They are the ones that we have most trouble with. The offside rule as
it stands now is that the attacking player must be in line with the second-last
defender, the last defender usually being the goalkeeper. So the official on the
line, who’s known as the assistant referee, has to position himself on the
line of the second-last defender, the outfield defender, and make sure that at
the point where the ball is played to the attacker, that he is on the line or
further away from the goal than that, at the point when the ball is played, not
when it arrives at his feet, or at his head. And that’s where some of the
problems arise, because even with very good peripheral vision, the assistant
referee can only probably cover an angle of about 45-degrees, so if the ball’s
played from a deeper position than that, the referee has to swivel his head from
the attacker to the person that’s playing the ball, and then back to the
attacker, and in that time, even if it’s as short as let’s say a tenth of a
second, the attacker has moved, could have moved up to a metre. And if you’ve
got a good defence, they know what’s happening and they probably move up so
that the relative positions of the attackers and the defenders can change in
that instant. And that’s why there are apparent discrepancies.
Amanda Smith: So that’s really a problem inherent in the game, having this
offside rule?
Roy Hay: It is indeed. And many people have suggested we should scrap the
offside rule, and that has been experimented with. It resulted in high scoring
games, but what happened was you tended to have attackers all lined up along the
goal area of the attacking side, and the game became congested at both ends with
long balls being bumped from one end of the field to the other. And the
spectators, and the players, got turned off by this. So the offside rule does
play an important part in the game.
Amanda Smith: Now what about all the yellow and red cards that have been given
to players at this World Cup for simulation, as it’s called?
Roy Hay: Yes, a form of cheating. And the critical one at the moment is this –
since matches are often decided on penalty kicks, the attackers like to think
that if they go down in the penalty box on the slightest contact, they will get
a penalty kick awarded in their favour, and hence give their side a chance of
winning the game. The result is, of course, then those marginal decisions, where
the attacking player goes down and there might have been no contact at all, and
this is what referees have been encouraged to crack down on, the people cheating
by going down when there’s been no impact, no illegal impact. I should stress
that point, because there’s still the possibility of a shoulder charge between
players, where they meet side by side, or a tackle in which the defender plays
the ball and then the attacker goes over the defender’s leg. In those cases,
no penalty kick, no free kick should be given.
Amanda Smith: So do you think there’s been a kind of culture of blame around
this World Cup, when the big powers were falling to lesser soccer countries in
the first three rounds?
Roy Hay: I think this is absolutely right. The old order has changed this year,
and that has been a bit of a shock to the system, and I think it started right
at the beginning, when France, who were defending champion and many people’s
either first or second favourite for the competition, went out to what many
people almost regarded as a French second team, Senegal, since most of the
players play in the French League, and of course Senegal was a former French
colony. And then when they were followed by Argentina, Italy, Spain, Portugal,
all great powers in the game, and in the case of Argentina, the other favourite
to win the competition, there’s a tendency to look around to account for your
failure in something other than the quality of your play and your inefficiency
in front of goal. And of course the easiest scapegoat for this is the poor old
referee and his assistant.
Amanda Smith: The thing about soccer though, more than many team sports, is that
because it is such a low-scoring game, the referees decisions do seem to have a
great impact on the result. I mean a single disallowed goal will impact much
more on the outcome of a soccer match than it’s likely to in other football
codes, for example.
Roy Hay: I think that’s true of the other football codes, but not of all
sports necessarily. I mean if you look at something like baseball, that also
tends to be a low-scoring game, and there too the umpires come in for a fair
amount of criticism. I think you’re absolutely right to stress that refereeing
decisions do become significant in the game, if you have a relatively
low-scoring competition. But when you think about it, the question really is
could we get those decisions better? Could we reduce the margin for error in
these games by other means? That seems to me to be a much more important
question to address.
Amanda Smith: Well can we?
Roy Hay: Well the suggestions at the moment are that we should have a much
greater use of technology, replays of decisions and trying to find ways of
getting a second opinion very quickly on the incident that has occurred. My
feeling about this is that using technology just shifts the locus of
decision-making. We’ve tried this in cricket; it’s interesting that they
tried video review in American football for a couple of seasons, and then
abandoned it and went back to the decisions by the people on the field. I think
we have to be extraordinarily careful about what we think we see on television
because the same incident, shown from different angles, can be everything from a
clear foul, a fair challenge, or no significant contact at all. Shots taken at
an angle to the field, are often presented on television as if they’re giving
an accurate, irrefutable piece of evidence about the alignment of players, hence
offside decisions, when they’re no such thing. And similarly, shots taken of
whether a ball has or has not crossed a line, unless the camera is absolutely at
right-angles to the field of play, that decision is not made. So there really
are problems about using video evidence to start with, and then of course there
is this terrible problem that it would break up the flow of the game while you
sit down and argue whether the referee got it right or not. And if you think
about it, there was a famous goal scored in the World Cup Final in 1966 when
England won the competition, where the ball struck the underside of the
crossbar, bounced down on or near the goal line, and then back out. And the
referee consulted the linesman and gave a goal. Now scientists have analysed
this result ever since 1966 with no conclusive decision made, so we really
can’t wait that long for the video people to come up with a result in a game
that depends on flow and action, unlike sports like cricket, where at least you
have some natural pauses in the game. But even there, the use of video evidence
is still highly controversial.
Amanda Smith: And that’s what the President of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, now reckons
too, about using video evidence. And that was sports historian, and soccer man,
Roy Hay.
And as we approach the 70th birthday of the ABC, born 1st July, 1932, on The
Sports Factor we’re going back to the early days of sports broadcasting, in
particular, the ‘synthetic’ cricket commentaries on ABC Radio in the 1930s.
SONG ‘Radio Days’
Amanda Smith: By the time the Australian Broadcasting Commission was founded in
1932, wireless cricket commentary had already been trialled. And according to
Jim Maxwell, the voice of ABC Radio cricket in the modern era, it was an
Australian first.
Jim Maxwell: 1923 was the first year that there were broadcasts, transmissions
of events from Phillip Street in Sydney, and it wasn’t long after that, that
the various stations that got these A-class licences from the
Postmaster-General’s Department, before the ABC came along in 1932, thought
that some of these sporting events were worth covering. And in 1924,/’25,
there was an Ashes series in Australia, and in the Third Test in Adelaide, the
first ball-by-ball commentary was given on a commercial station called 5CL in
Adelaide, by Bill Smallicombe who actually described almost the entire Test
Match, which must have worn him out, because it was a timeless Test, it went for
seven days.
And given that also in those days very few people actually had receivers; what
they did was burst the broadcast out from loudspeakers all around Adelaide, and
the people were really taken by these broadcasts, and Bill Smallicombe became a
celebrity overnight. Now Smallicombe did the first ball-by-ball commentary, but
Edgar Mayne on 3AR in Melbourne in that same series, and later in the year, Len
Watt and Monty Noble on what became the ABC in Sydney, did some commentary of a
Test trial between Australia and The Rest at the SCG. But I think Bill
Smallicombe takes the credit for originating ball-by-ball commentary, not only
in Australia but in the world, because the BBC weren’t doing ball-by-ball
commentary until 1934.
Amanda Smith: One of those very early Australian broadcasters Jim Maxwell
mentioned was Len, or Lionel, Watt. In this archival interview from 1957, Lionel
Watt tells how it began for him, when he simply mentioned a few thoughts he’d
been having about covering cricket on the wireless, to the Farmers Broadcasting
Company.
Lionel Watt: And the next thing I knew, was that I was at the Cricket Ground,
sitting in front of a microphone, with a technician saying ‘You’re on the
air. Talk!’ So I started off as the umpires took the field, discussed the wind
and other weather conditions, and when play began went on describing each ball
of the over. I kept on going. A little later, a message came from the studio
saying, ‘That’s what we want; keep going’, and thus began the
ball-for-ball broadcasting which has become a feature of all first-class
cricket, and of particular entertainment value when an Australian team is in
England.
In the days when I started, it was a case of crystal sets and headphones, but it
caught the imagination of the public at once. Afterwards, the Australian
Broadcasting Company was formed. They continued the broadcasts, and then when
the Australian Broadcasting Commission came into being in 1932, they developed
it.
I did all matches for nine years, including the famous Bodyline series of Tests
of 1932/’33, which were so full of bitterness.
Amanda Smith: That series in Australia in 1932/’33 was the first Test cricket
covered by the new national broadcaster, the ABC. And because this Bodyline
series was so dramatic and so controversial, it sparked huge public interest in
cricket on the radio. But for the next Ashes series, played in England in 1934,
there was a problem. Overseas short-wave transmission wasn’t reliable enough
to send live commentary back to Australia. So the ABC developed and refined an
idea that had been tried previously by commercial stations: doing a fake
commentary from telegrams. Jim Maxwell.
Jim Maxwell: Well they had a crack at it in 1930, it was actually a combination
of two commercial stations, 3DB and 2UW that came up with a way of getting the
information across, but they didn’t do what became known as the
‘synthetic’ broadcast. Because the commercial stations saw some novelty
value in having a mix of cricket and live entertainers, comedians, they didn’t
do what the ABC became famous for. And the ABC actually had 13 people between
those that were interpreting the information, the technicians and the
broadcasters in and around the studio to do this kind of synthetic or ghost
broadcasting of the game. And they’d adopted a code from which the
commentators were able to come up with some invention about what occurred on a
particular ball.
Commentator: Farnes bowling to Bradman. It’s a short ball, Bradman moves back
and pulls fiercely past square leg. Hutton running round from deep fine leg has
no chance, and the ball goes under the ropes for another four. That’s four
more to Bradman, taking his score to 97, a typical Bradman shot, giving the
fieldsmen no chance of saving a boundary.
Jim Maxwell: Every couple of minutes, someone would dash into the studio with
message No. 46 let’s say, and on that piece of paper there would be a code for
the six balls of the over. Now remember the commentator’s sitting there with a
picture of the ground, and for each bowler he knew which fieldsman, say it was
Australia in the field, was in which position. So the code might come through
with the word ‘unchance’, and this indicated that the ball had been hit on
the full, past the bowler for 4 runs. And so then he would go into a description
that led him through that. ‘Fleetwood-Smith comes into bowl, and Hammond’s
down the pitch; he’s hit it on the full, straight past the bowler, down the
ground for four’, and up would come the applause from the sound effects
created by Dion Wheeler or Des Turner, who was sitting across from the
commentator with a couple of disks. Imagine the timing that was involved in this
to bring up off disk, dropping the needle in the right spot, to get those sound
effects, and the commentator who sat there with a pencil, and whacked it on a
little wooden device in front of him, to make the sound that was similar to a
bat hitting a ball as he described: ‘Bowes comes in and bowls to Bradman, and
Bradman (WHACK) hits it through the covers for four’, and so it did sound very
real. And there was a point during this sort of cricket charade that Charles
Moses, who was one of the instigators of it all, had to go and shoot a Movietone
thing for the newsreel to explain to everybody ‘This is what actually happens;
we’re all sitting in a studio, we’re not at the ground. So although you may
think we’re giving you a live commentary of the game, we are actually in a
studio, we’re making it up.’ But radio being the illusion that it is, they
could get away with it, and they did.
But a lot of people used to come in and sit outside the studios and listen to
it, all rugged up with their thermoses and their sandwiches and the rest of it,
because they just couldn’t afford to buy the radio, so they just came into the
city and sat down there in Melbourne and in Sydney and listened to the
broadcasts on loudspeakers.
Amanda Smith: ABC Radio cricket commentator, Jim Maxwell.
And here’s a snippet from that 1938 newsreel, introduced by Charles Moses
(later Sir Charles Moses) who was the General Manager of the ABC from 1935 to
1964, and who’d been a commentator on the first synthetic cricket broadcasts.
Charles Moses: On the eve of the 1938 Test cricket series, I have been asked to
explain to you how the synthetic ball-by-ball descriptions are broadcast by the
national stations. Let us follow the course of a typical message as received in
the Commission’s Sydney studios, only a minute after the actual happening on
the Test ground in England. This cable is taken down in duplicate, and
immediately amplified by cricket experts who fill in details regarding field
placements on model cricket fields, for the commentator whom you can now see
broadcasting his description from the amplified cable information. As the shot
is made, the effects man, who has in front of him a copy of the cable message,
drops the needle on an effects record and listeners hear the applause of the
crowd as the shot reaches the boundary. And now, let us listen in.
Commentator: Farnes turns, runs in bowling to Bradman, it’s a ball
well-pitched. Bradman moves forward, drives, Compton at cover tries to cut it
off, he’s beaten by the pace of the ball and it races away for another four.
APPLAUSE. Four more to Bradman, taking his score to 101, a century in 130
minutes, a glorious innings by us and Australia is now building herself into a
very sound position, assisted by a great knock by Bradman.
Amanda Smith: The commentator there was Alan McGilvray, who died in 1996.
McGilvray’s long and illustrious career as an ABC cricket broadcaster began in
1934. And we’ll hear an archival interview with him later in this story.
A chap who also started with the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1934 was
Bernard Kerr. He went on to become the ABC’s Federal Sporting Supervisor. In
1947, Bernard Kerr reflected on his involvement in the synthetic Test
broadcasts.
Bernard Kerr: Well it was pretty exciting for me because I was just a newcomer,
I was just a lad, and there I was right in the middle of a broadcast that was
then creating history, although we didn’t realise it, and those synthetic
descriptions I think were the outstanding broadcasts in my time. My job was to
take down the cables that came direct from England; there was a special
telegraphic link put in by the London Post Office, their co-operation was
wonderful, and it came straight through to the Sydney Post Office, and then
there was a chap there phoning it through to me and I used to take it down with
Jim Hall. And we were only one over behind. We got a cable every over, and in
that cable we got the scoring shots only, so I used to have to take them down
and then used to help to decode, and it went into the commentator’s, Mr Moses
was one of them, with a very fertile imagination.
Amanda Smith: Now while some creative licence was clearly taken with this
synthetic commentary, the ABC never set out to pretend that the coverage was
actually coming from overseas. Even so, as Sir Charles Moses explained later, it
didn’t stop many listeners believing that what they were hearing was coming
direct from the matches in England.
Charles Moses; Well I must say the very first night, it’s quite clear that a
number of people though it came directly from England because I had to settle
some bets; I had several letters from people who said they’d bet that it came
directly from England and somebody had tried to persuade them it didn’t. So
there’s no doubt about it, a lot of people were convinced that it was directly
from the ground and not from the studio. It also had one other effect, quite
apart from the fact that it drew an audience, and that is 1934 showed the record
increase in licences in the whole history of broadcasting, twice as much as any
preceding year and certainly much bigger than any year since.
Amanda Smith: The synthetic cricket broadcasts were a great audience boost for
the fledgling national broadcaster in the 1930s, even though most of the
coverage went to air in the middle of the night; as Bernard Kerr and Charles
Moses remembered in this 1957 interview.
Bernard Kerr: We had a lot of fun behind the scenes, even though it was hard
work. We were on the air from 8.25 to half-past-three in the morning, with just
a break for lunch and tea, so you can imagine what a tremendous job it was for
the commentators. But we had our fun when the cables broke down, and of course
we had some stories made up, but nevertheless, they were fairly true, such as a
batsman having trouble with his glove, and then having trouble with the strap on
his pad.
Charles Moses: And how often Larwood’s boots gave him trouble.
Bernard Kerr: Yes, that’s quite true. And the best way though when the cables
broke down, was to whip in a few maiden overs.
Amanda Smith: Aside from having to make up what to say during the breakdowns in
the cable service, the commentators also had to learn to pace themselves, as
Alan McGilvray discovered, and discussed after his retirement in 1985.
Alan McGilvray: It was a peculiar experience to sit down for the first time and
try and do it. And then of course you’ve got the cable, six balls on it, and
I’d dash through it, I’d get through those in about 2 minutes, and it took
me a long while to realise, and in fact it took all of us a long while to
realise, that the over would take about 4-1/2 to 5 minutes. So when we finished
those six balls, we had no further information, no cables, and so we used to
look at the door for this young runner they had, to come in from the decoding
room and give me a bit of paper with some particulars on it. And then suddenly,
someone woke up and said, ‘Look, we’re getting through this in 2 minutes;
that means we have a lot of padding to do.’ As you well know, padding is the
most difficult part of a cricket broadcast, particularly on radio.
Amanda Smith: And Alan McGilvray also paid tribute to the skill and imagination
of Charles Moses in making these synthetic cricket broadcasts work.
Alan McGilvray: It was a marvellous piece of work by Moses to arrange all this
and co-ordination it until the end. You know, we were only about one minute
behind the actual ball being hit in England, and I thought it was remarkable,
the speed that he was able to arrange, Moses, and set it up, and make us live as
though we were at the ground. It was what you call today motivation, but I
don’t think we used that word in my years.
Amanda Smith: By the time of the 1938 Ashes series in England, short wave
reception to Australia had improved enough to allow for some liver coverage
direct from the matches, although there was still plenty of the synthetic
commentary as well. For this series the ABC sent Eric Sholl to England to
arrange both kinds of coverage.
Eric Sholl: Until 1938 we had never had the consistently good reception needed
to cover a cricket match. So I went prepared to send cables, or work with short
wave, or rather more likely, both. Having sent the cables during the South
African tour, I knew that somewhat elaborate technique. It had improved since
1934 when our representative with the English team had had to lower his messages
in a bucket from the pavilion at Lord’s.
Amanda Smith: Well Jim Maxwell, can you imagine what it would have been like to
essentially make up your cricket commentary in the way those broadcasts were in
1934 and 1938? I mean how difficult would it have been, and can you imagine
doing it yourself?
Jim Maxwell: I think I can, given that they did have this code which gave them
some fairly accurate information, because it came through in the shape of every
ball of the over had a code to it. So you could work out whether the batsman had
hit the ball for four, had missed it, had been out; there was that kind of basic
information, and given that the people involved in the broadcast had a fairly
intimate knowledge of the style, the strengths, weaknesses, of various players,
I don’t think it would have been too difficult for their imagination to create
a scene that would have been believable. And clearly it was, because people just
wanted more and more of the broadcasts, they just loved it. And radio, as it has
always done, lent that immediacy of coverage of the game.
And it’s very hard now for people to comprehend this, given that they can just
flick the television on and get pictures from the other side of the world, but
in those days you can imagine listening on the crackling radio, being able to
get these glimpses, these snatches of commentary, and the description of Bradman
on the rampage again at The Oval or at Lord’s. It must have been a wonderful
thing for those people back in Australia who wanted to see their brilliant
sportsmen taking on that old lion on the other side of the world and really
giving it a good tug of its tail.
SONG ‘Radio Days’
Amanda Smith: And reflecting on those early days of cricket on the radio,
commentator, Jim Maxwell. And archivally speaking, Sir Charles Moses, Alan
McGilvray, Bernard Kerr, Eric Sholl, and Lionel Watt.
And that’s The Sports Factor for this Friday. Program producer is Maria
Tickle. I’m Amanda Smith. Enjoy the rest of your day with Radio National.
Guests on this program:
|
Roy Hay - Sports Historian
|
|
|
Jim Maxwell - ABC Sports Broadcaster
|
|
Musical Items:
|
Radio Days
Artist: The Kanes
Composer: John Kane, Genni Kane
Copyright: Rondor |
|
Presenter:
Amanda Smith
Producer:
Maria Tickle
©
2003 ABC
This is an archive copy of a document originally located at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/sportsf/stories/s590482.htm
All copyright remains with the creator.
